(Closed) Tough Chicken Breasts – Leftovers

So my husband, bless him, made dinner last night. The chicken breasts weren’t quite done and he had to leave, so he decided to put them in liquid and braise them at a low temperature in the oven (two fifty). For about two hours, until we both got home.

This is a good way to make tough chicken, fyi. Of course, I told him it was thoughtful.

However. He used a whole valuepack of breasts. There’s at least two and a half pounds of leftover tough chicken that we need to eat this weekend. I just tried slicing it thin and putting it in a salad, which is marginally better but still pretty chewy.

Any other ideas for how I can use these leftovers without us having to chew each piece about 42 times?

Chicken Noodle Soup. Or you can cut it up REALLY finely and mix in BBQ sauce and do a make shift BBQ pulled chicken sandwich. If you heat it up at all, add a little salted water to the bottom of the dish and it might help as well.

Although I havn’t done it – I saw on pinterest that if you have a kitchen aid mixer – you can just throw the cooked breasts in there & it bascially shreads it. I think shreaded chicken would be the best for soup that way you don’t have huge chunks of hard chicken.

Shred it very finely and mix with beans and cheese for burritos or enchiladas. Enchiladas are probably better as you get to drown them in sauces.

It’s the protein in the chicken breast (or beef, or whatever) that makes it toughen as it cooks. Heat a protien and it firms up— chemical reaction basically. So at this point you have already taken the protein to the point where it’s super firm, and if you were to cook it longer, *eventually* the protein would completely break down and it would soften back up again. The problem is that chicken breast has very little fat to moisten the meat, and what little fat is in there has probably already been cooked off. What little might remain will be long gone by the time the protein starts breaking back down. Which is why you can cook a red meat like brisket, see it toughen up, then see it soften and still have it be moist, but why that approach won’t really work for chicken. You could theoretically cook it longer and it’d soften up but it would be beyond dry and probably really nasty.

So just look for recipes where the meat should be shredded/diced very small and there’s a fair amount of added moisture by way of sauces or fats (cheese, etc).

Chicken salad sandwiches – just chop the chicken into small pieces. I like to have lots of other stuff in my chicken salad, so the chicken really isn’t the main ingredient. Pecans, celery, apples, I’ve even had it with water chestnuts, grapes, and sprouts. My husband calls it a fruit salad that happens to have chicken in it!